- According to an internal email, there are plans underway to overhaul Google Assistant with more generative AI capabilities.
- Google is currently moving around team members in order to focus on the overhaul.
- Some jobs are also being lost as a result of the shift in focus for Google Assistant.
The current obsession with generative AI and integrating into nearly every facet of business shows no signs of abating. This as Google is the latest company looking at how to implement the technology into existing products, with one of those being Google Assistant.
The company already has a generative AI platform in the form of Bard, but supercharging Assistant with those features could be a bit more far-reaching, given that the solution already exists in a number of Google products and hardware that are already in-market.
While there is no mention yet as to when an overhauled version of Google Assistant would be rolled out, employees at the company have been informed of the re-focus, according to an internal email discovered by Axios.
“Since we launched Assistant seven years ago, we’ve built great experiences for the hundreds of millions of people who use it every month. And we’ve heard people’s strong desire for assistive, conversational technology that can improve their lives,” the aforementioned email laid out.
“As a team, we need to focus on delivering high-quality, critical product experiences for our users. We’ve also seen the profound potential of generative AI to transform people’s lives and see a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest LLM technology, would look like. (A portion of the team has already started working on this, beginning with mobile.),” it added.
The shift in focus will see Google chopping and changing some existing teams, with Axios also noting that there will be some casualties as a result.
“As part of this update, we are also eliminating a small number of roles within the team. We have already let these teammates know and we will provide dedicated support to help them through this transition,” the email pointed out.
With Microsoft having beaten Google to the punch when it comes to rolling out generative AI tools and solutions thanks to its ownership of OpenAI, this next move from the company makes a lot of sense, especially given the power and reach of its search.
[Image – Photo by Sayan Majhi on Unsplash]
[Source – Axios]
